The Medicine Hat Photography Club is presenting “The Road Less Taken”, a gallery showing of photography from club members, taking place at the Medalta. The full show is running from July 5th through until the 30th, but the gala opening is taking place tonight (July 6th) at 7PM.

There will be snacks, drinks and a live performance by Poet Lark. A table will be set up with a guest book and a chance to win a print of your choice.

If you don’t know, the Medalta is located at 713 Medalta Avenue SE and the work will be shown in the Medalta Squared Gallery.

The Roving Art Reception is the first event to happen in the newly launched and formed “The Hive Artist’s Hub“. The art reception is happening from 7:00PM to 10:00PM and will even feature a live band, aptly named, “Art School”. The live and local band will be performing from 7:00PM to 8:00PM.

The reception will be featuring the art of: Kelsie Risling, Alana Holst, Mitchell Martin, Chelsea Scott, Kristian Jungk and Tobie Laliberte. It’s almost a post-Visual Communications show in a sense with that line-up.

The Hive is located at 569 2nd Street SE.

All the Colours of the Spectrum is also happening tonight as part of the Roving Art Exhibition, please view the full post here.

Looking for the Spectrum 2011 post?

I have already posted about All the Colours of the Spectrum, but what about the main event? This year it taking place over the following dates:

• Friday 4-10PM (June 4th)
• Saturday 11AM-10PM (June 5th)
• Sunday 11AM-4PM (June 6th)

The main Spectrum event contains a huge amount of art, sports, dance, music, food, festivities and other performances (including the magic of Trevor Moore). In fact, I think this post has been tagged with the most categories a single post has ever received. The following is a list of stage performers (which are free, by the way):

Friday, June 4th

4:00 – 4:45 – German Harmony Band
5:00 – 5:45 – Amy Nelson
5:45 – 6:30 – The Magic of Trevor Moore
6:30 – 8:00 – Scott Ward – Hypnotist
8:15 – 9:15 – Kool Ray and the Hip Kats

Saturday, June 5th

11:30 – Amy Nelson
12:00 – Walk a Mile in her Shoes
12:30 – Amy Nelson
1:00 – Medicine Hat’s Got Talent
2:00 – Dance Connection
3:00 – Master’s Extreme Makeover
4:30 – 5:30 – The Straight Jackets
5:30 – 6:30 – Blacksmith Jones
6:45 – 7:45 – The Magic of Trevor Moore
8:00 – 10:00 – Jazz – Lyle Rebbeck

Sunday, June 6th

12:00 – Gas Town Riot
1:00 – Medicine Hat’s Got Talent
2:00 – Dance Connection
3:00 – Quintet

Besides performances, there’s also a ton of other activities and events to keep you busy: THE JUMP – Read the rest of this entry »

Spectrum, the annual downtown summer festival is taking place this year on June 4th, Friday from 4-10PM, June 5th, Saturday from 11AM-10PM, and June 6th, Sunday 11AM-4 PM. All the Colours of the Spectrum is an art event to coincide with the main Spectrum festivities taking place on Thursday, June 3rd, hosted by Inspire Studio & Gallery, Framing and Art Centre, Sandfly Gallery & Gifts and the Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre. “Celebrate the sunshine with All the Colours of the Spectrum” is their tag-line for this year. Let’s just hope there’s no snow and rain with that sunshine like last year. Art, food, refreshments, live music are some of the key points of All the Colours of the Spectrum (and the Spectrum in general). Below is the festivities taking place during All the Colours of the Spectrum.

Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre
401 First Street S.E.
403-502-8793

Featuring a drop-in, hands-on family activity making miniature stand-up houses, based on Gordon Harper’s exhibition in the Ar Gallery, Nocturnes and School Art 2010. All supplies are provided; workshop and gallery admission are free. From 6PM to 8PM only.

Framing and Art Centre
628 2nd Stree S.E.
403-527-2600

Featuring “Through Footlights & Fog – The Esplanade Shows”
Photography by Bruce J. Dynes

Inspire Studio & Gallery
659 2nd Street S.E. (2nd Floor)
403-580-1808

Featuring acrylic paintings by Alana Holst, pastel paintings by Kathy Mann, photographs and encaustics by Lynne Alexander.

Sandfly Gallery & Gifts
512 2nd Street S.E. (2nd Floor)
403-488-0426

Featuring “Progress and Transformation”, a group exhibition including over a dozen local and Western Canadian artists.

Kaleidoscope of the Arts is coming up and will feature the best young artists in the Prairie Rose School Division. The event will take place on Saturday, May 29th at The Esplanade Arts and Heritage Centre in Medicine Hat.

The event will feature more than 30 musical and dramatic performances, dozens of solo performances and 300-plus paintings, drawings, pottery pieces, photographs and multimedia displays throughout The Esplanade.

Admission is free and all members of the public are welcome to attend. Kaleidoscope begins at 9 a.m. and continues until the 5 p.m. awards ceremony.

“Kaleidoscope is a chance to showcase the high quality of fine arts being produced by students of the Prairie Rose School Division,” said Doug Nicholls, superintendent.

The event will be significantly larger than its first two years with more participants in every area.

New to the event this year is the introduction of a People’s Choice Award. Attendees will be handed a ballot and encouraged to select their favourite piece of art or performance. The artist or artists with the most votes will receive the Alicia Hargrave People’s Choice Award, named for a former Prairie Rose student who was an avid artist. Hargrave passed away in 2007.

“Kaleidoscope’s growth is an indication of the importance of the fine arts for our division,” said Nicholls. “The talent on display will be remarkable.”

For more info, contact Wilbur McLean of the Prairie Rose School Division at 403.527.5516, ext. 2319.

Click here for the Kaleidoscope of The Arts news release.

Reconciliation Invite Image

It seems Medicine Hat Media has been left out of the Visual Communications graduation show media release for the second year in a row. This is the last time we will advertise for them! Just kidding… or am I?

The exhibition for the graduation show is open daily between April 3-12 from 9:30AM and 4:30PM in the Medicine Hat College’s main lobby. The reception happens on Friday, April 9th, at 7:00PM, which coincides with The Children’s Hour that starts up at 7:30PM on the 9th.

I have received an invitation through my place of employment for the grad show, but it does not give too much information about what you can expect by attending the show. So judging by their website, reconcilehere.ca, it looks as though there are drawings, paintings, photographs, graphic design and perhaps sculptures.

The branding for the grad show  is done again with a straight Helvetica type face. The website is a minimalistic WordPress theme, which unlike past years, allows everyone with access to the back-end of it to log in and upload their own photos. The website allows users to “Reconcile“, whereby the user can post any reconciliations they have, which will then automatically be posted to the website. I posted one:

I am a sad panda that this website was not submitted to http://www.medicinehatmedia.com to raise awareness for the reception!
-Sean

I hope this years graduation show is not advertised to be environmentally friendly, like last year’s Lost & Found show, whose organizers purchased huge amounts of corrugated cardboard to be connotative of the theme, which was probably just thrown out afterwards.

The reception should be host to food and alcoholic/non-alcoholic beverages, music and dancing. Come down, check some art, hear some music and get your fill of food. THE JUMP – Read the rest of this entry »

Two Thought-Provoking Exhibitions by Medicine Hat Artists Open Saturday at the Esplanade Art Gallery
The Esplanade Art Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of two new exhibitions on display until Apr. 11.

Laara Cassells: e·strange

What does the generation dubbed ‘the intentionally disengaged’ have to do with the long-established tradition of the equestrian (a.k.a. horse) portrait? Artist Laara Cassells is surrounded in her daily life by young people and horses, and in this new and insightful body of work, she brings both together to muse on popular culture and its intersection with the values of tradition and the natural world. Curator of art Joanne Marion comments: “Laara Cassells poses intriguing questions with flashes of humour in these elegant double portraits: about the directions in which today’s digital communications are taking us, about the fate of the natural world, about the meaning of our cultural traditions… and she generously leaves the answers up to the viewer.”

Laara Cassells’ practice as an artist spans painting, sculpture, installation and multi-media performances. Her work has been presented in numerous exhibitions and performances around the world, including Canada, the United States, Hungary, Korea, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland and Italy. Cassells divides her time between Medicine Hat, where she is a faculty member of the Visual Communications Program at Medicine Hat College, and Sundre, Alberta.

Dana Shukster: Pre-Flight –Trace

Dana Shukster’s recent explorations of the fleeting aspects of light have led to the creation of a series of large scale, sepia-toned inkjet prints on paper. These mysterious images are derived from projected shadows of magpies in flight, and are accompanied in the gallery by video and direct shadow projections. “Dana Shukster’s process is almost scientific in its rationality, and yet the results are certainly poetic and even eerie. Her works give us pause to wonder at the arbitrary nature of our perception of our transitory world,” says curator of art Joanne Marion.

Dana Shukster is based in Medicine Hat, Alberta and has exhibited her work across Canada and in the United States and Europe. Her work has been supported by grants and awards from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and is held in numerous public and private collections in Alberta and British Columbia.

e·strange and Pre-Flight –Trace are on display in the Esplanade Art Gallery until Apr. 11, 2010. The opening reception is Thursday, Mar. 4 at 7:30 p.m. in the Gallery Foyer. The artists will be present and will give a brief tour of their work. There is no charge to attend the reception and everyone is welcome.

The Alberta Foundation for the Arts Travelling Exhibition Program, southeast Alberta region, announced today the opening of a new travelling art exhibition at the Medicine Hat Public Library, 414 First Street SE. The Fantastical World of Jeff de Boer will be on display at the library until Feb. 24, 2010.

The Fantastical World of Jeff de Boer is populated by intrepid explorers, armoured warriors, robots, flying machines and mysterious ‘exoforms.’ He has spent a lifetime imagining the hero’s transformative journey through his art. The metal sculptures and schematic drawings presented in this travelling exhibition reflect the sculptor’s keen awareness of tradition and potential of technology to shape the future.

The son of a tinsmith, Jeff de Boer began working with metal at the age of five. He built his first complete set of armour before finishing high school. As a graduate of the Alberta College of Art and Design in 1988, de Boer garnered much early critical attention with his unique armour for cats and mice. There are wonderful and intricate examples of cat, mice and rat armour in this exhibition that humorously explore the relationship between predator and prey, as well as the relationship of opposites in nature. De Boer also reveals his interest in Asian philosophy and culture with a major sculpture from the collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts entitled, The Buddha in You.

The conception of de Boer’s highly refined sculptures often begins and develops through schematic drawings. This travelling exhibition presents work drawings related to his major commissions such as the RoboFamily at the Vancouver Science World. THE JUMP – Read the rest of this entry »

The First Year students in the Visual Communication program at The Medicine Hat College are holding an exhibition at the Medalta Squared Gallery to showcase their best work so far in their career as artists.

The show runs from January 21st to February 1st and the opening reception is on Friday, January 29th at 8:00PM.

There will, as usual, be snacks and drinks for guests to partake in. Go have a looksee.

As an addendum to the Midnight Madness Downtown 2009 article recently posted, the Esplanade has a great line-up scheduled for Thursday:

Medicine Hat Tigers Add to the Madness at the Esplanade

The Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre celebrates Midnight Madness on Thursday, Nov. 26 with a free craft workshop for kids, free admission to the galleries, guided tours, free hot chocolate and popcorn, and an Xbox™ tournament against a Medicine Hat Tiger hockey player. Midnight Madness activities are free and open to the public.

“The Art Gallery and Museum are currently showcasing Hockey Culture at the Esplanade with three exhibitions related to hockey, so it was natural to invite the Medicine Hat Tigers downtown for Midnight Madness to continue the whole hockey theme,” says Joanne Marion, Curator of Art at the Esplanade. THE JUMP – Read the rest of this entry »